The following visualizations relate to the Somerville Happiness Survey Responses from 2019. This survey is completed every 2 years in Somerville, Massachusetts and it asks a random sample of residents to rate their personal happiness, wellbeing, and satisfaction with the city. You can access the data and the survey that residents receive here: Visit Somerville.Gov Website.
I was drawn to this specific dataset because I am from Somerville. There are alot of assumptions I make about the city, based on interactions I have with the people I know. Starting this analysis, I made decisions to evaluate certain pieces of the survey to get some understanding of hypotheses I had in regards to the city (i.e. people who live in one area of the city may dislike the city more).
It's also important to know that this is not wholistic of all residents who live in the city. There may be large portions of the population who did not respond to the survey for various reasons, like access to the survey. The survey was sent out in multiple languages.
First I wanted to review the survey question of “How satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live?” I specifically wanted to see resident’s ratings compared to the ward they lived in. A map of Somerville’s wards can be found here: link.
Things to note are popular areas of the city:
In the following chart you can filter the contents of the plot to the right by clicking and dragging your mouse over a section of the chart to the left. You can also hover over each point to gain more insight into the count, ward and satisfaction level.
Two interesting things I gathered is that people in general are satisfied with Somerville as a place to live. There are significantly more responses rating the conditions 7+ than there are any with rating 0-3. I also found it interesting Ward 1 and the most responses for rating the city as 0 for satisfaction and the least responses for rating the city a 10. From there observations, it seeems that residents of Ward 1 tend to be more critical of Somerville and their Neighborhood, compared to other residents of the city who responded to the survey.
I decided to see if there was any relation between a residents satisfaction with Somerville as a place to live and their specific neighborhood (gathered by the question “How satisfied are you with your Neighborhood").
In the following chart you can filter the contents of the plot to the right by clicking and dragging your mouse over a section of the chart to the left. You can also hover over each point to gain more insight into the count, ward and satisfaction level.
Again, I found that residents of Ward 1 and the second to last least responses rating their neighborhood a 10 and the most number of responses rating their neighborhood a 0. This is interesting and to me indicates some negativity regarding the city to those who live in Ward 1. Correlations due to major attractions could be the traffic caused by I-93 or Assembly Row. Or A lack of responses due to this area majorly consisting of industrial and commercial area.
The chart below allows us to see the data from above side by side, specific to each ward. Please note that the y axis of each plot is independent of the one below and above. There wasn't anything I determined from this plot, but was simply useful in coming to the conclusions and observations I noted above.
The survey also had a question regarding if residents believed the city was headed in the correct track. Based on the overall high satisfaction of residents in regards to the city and their neighborhood, I wanted to see the responses to this question.
For the chart below, hover over each section of the pie chart to see the count of that section.
Here we can see that there is a majority of people who believe that the city is headed in the right direction (also denoted in the color green), but there are also large portions of people who aren’t sure of the city’s direction or believe that the city is headed in the wrong track.